Subscribe To

Email

Follow by Email

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Fear and Self-Loathing in Denver (Part 1)

A Literary Homage from the Depraved Center of a Cultural Revolution

Fear (of Loathing) - 18 April, 2015

“Buy the ticket. Take the ride.”

It’s an easy enough thing to repeat to
yourself over and over again. But once in a while you also embark on the kind
of trip, where the phrase begins to carry new weight. From the moment the
thought first enters your head, you know nothing will ever be the same. There
are some trains of thought, where you know from the moment you begin pulling on
threads that they are connected intrinsically to the Main Nerve.

It feels overwhelmingly safe, in those
moments, to say, “Fuck it!” To stay home, to pour another drink, roll another
joint, and not do anything at all; simply watch the world wander past the
window, and not worry much about making anything interesting out of the experience.
Because why bother, really? Nobody will be listening, no matter how well they
could maybe relate… It’s one of God’s hilariously cruel ironies.

But giving up without trying runs
counter to the fundamental American spirit. There is no room for such Fear at a
time like this. The early Western settlers could have stayed home and stayed
wasted like their cousins. But they didn’t. There are occasions of fundamental
historic value, in which the participants must recognize the importance of what
they are witnessing, and try to fully experience and capture the raw
significance of their place in time. Eventually, the terms by which we perceive
all of the great moments we did not personally witness are defined first and
most fundamentally by the people who lived them. We have the luxury, in our
modern time, of consciously defining those terms.

The people who settled Colorado, built
the first bits of infrastructure, and drove it to statehood were all hard,
determined people. Miners, prospectors, trappers, hunters… the kind of men and
women that shaped what is now thought of as the “American Character.” They were
independent, daring entrepreneurs, at the forefront of the movement that
defined their generation. And in retrospect, we consider their genocide of the
native races that previously inhabited those areas among our darkest origin
stories.

No matter how much things change, the
patterns stay the same. The physical stereotypes of the first official
Coloradans could scarcely be applied to many of my peers, and fewer still would
survive the former’s living conditions. But here we stand over 150 years later,
on the precipice of another cultural watershed, and the demographics and
sociological conditions are shockingly similar.

Since the state’s precedent-setting
legalization of recreational marijuana use, there has been a massive influx of
young people looking for a place to start their lives. Similarly to those who
fled West in the middle 19th century, they are emigrating from
economically oversaturated places, unable to provide them with futures, in
search of an environment where the next “big thing” is emerging. In 1840, it
was gold and silver. Today it is weed. But not everyone flocking to this
recurring frontier has hopes of cashing in. Many are just swimming with the
stream. Most of the people moving to Colorado right now are only tangentally
doing so because of the legal pot. They’re moving there because there’s currently
an unparalleled economic boom taking place as a result of said legal pot.
They’re moving there because, with legal weed, you get an explosion in creative
culture; artists in the streets, doing their thing; freaks letting their flags
fly. A significant portion of Americans in my demographic age group are moving
to Colorado because it’s cool.

So I have to go see it for myself. And
I have to tell you about what’s going on there. Because, while I may not have
been to the Centennial State in a good while – excluding a hallucinogenic
adventure to the curious abbreviated day-span of Ouray last summer, a town
situated in a narrow canyon, causing a state of almost perpetual dusk, which is
only briefly interrupted when the sun crosses the few inches of sky in even fewer
hours around midday – I recognize what is happening in what will one day be
referred to as this moment in history. And I realize that now is the time to
dive into the heart of the matter, drink deeply of it, and try to relay its
significance.

I’m not particularly clever in having
come to this realization. Many others have come to it on some level, though
perhaps few have been able to distinctly articulate it. I don’t claim some
special authority or enlightened right to denote landmark moments in cultural evolution.
I simply feel a duty to point out that, regardless of our intent, this is a
definitive moment in the development of my generation’s historical identity.
And I’d like to try to define that in terms that make sense to me, as a
participating member of whatever legacy my peers are forging. The only way to
properly explain this paradigm, which my children will one day consider passé,
is to fully and personally immerse myself in it and explain it on its own
terms. I harbor no delusion that I’m Hunter Thompson, but I firmly believe that
something like the Doctor’s brand of absurdist honesty is critically absent
from our modern world. As the man himself said, “When the going gets weird, the
weird turn pro,” and full Gonzo seems the only method that stands a chance of
explaining this situation in a way that’s relevant to those living it. So, I
intend to burrow straight to the center of this newest incarnation of the
American Dream, and explain it from that place.

The millennial generation is the burning
edge on the fuse of the American Experiment. More so than any other
demographical group in history, we don’t identify in any of the traditional
ways: nationalism, family structures, career paths, or even conventionally
accepted ideas of sexuality, beauty, and gender roles. It’s what happens when
you raise an entire generation on television and pop culture references, while
simultaneously developing the greatest cataloguing and cross-referencing system
ever devised by sentient creatures. We knew all the options in life earlier
than most other generations had even traveled beyond their hometowns. Then we
spent the better part of the last decade chiseling out a niche for ourselves as
the people who catalogued the world and fed it into the internet for posterity.
We organize and communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to those who
don’t engage in them. We’re independent in ways our parents would have thought
criminal and our grandparents couldn’t conceive of. And one of the ways in
which this is all very obviously manifesting itself in our society is the
inescapable eventuality of marijuana legalization. Colorado is a main nexus
around which that storm is converging, so it is there that I will search for my
generation’s Truth.

Today I bought the ticket. In two days
I will attend the Cannabis Cup in Denver, and face the horror of what happens
when you legitimize and commercialize a culture that was until recently
entirely built on interpersonal relationships and word of mouth. Now I must
take the ride. It is interesting, perhaps, to note that entering into this I
feel a great amount of Fear. But it is only a Fear of Loathing; that I will end up Loathing the very culture I have
thus far claimed as my own.

But that’s just defeatist nonsense. We
must venture bravely forth, and stare down the demons in the mirror. We must accept
our place in history and be like those early Coloradans. Only, perhaps we can
be aware of any cultural atrocity we potentially stand on the verge of, lest we
commit it again.

Bad Moon Rising - 19 April, 2015

Creedence is a fitting soundtrack for the drive north. The
mesa-pocked expanses of shrubbery and yellow grass are less harshly offset by
the twangy guitars than the sight of my compatriots reading The New Yorker as
we cruise in silent contemplation. The silence is only occasionally broken
whenever my window, on the passenger’s side of the back seat, sinks several
inches, gradually causing a loud, rushing wind to drown out the music until I
notice and push it back up with great effort and greasy fingers. The six hour
drive to Denver is not particularly difficult or unpleasant, but when you set
out in the afternoon, the likelihood that you will be greeted by anything but a
pack of drunks plummets by the hour.

Not that I have any problem with drunks. Some of my favorite
people are drunks. In fact, I am deeply thankful to not have to drive on this
trip, as it means I, too, get to be drunk. The owner of this vehicle does not
drink. Voluntary sobriety is a fantastically useful characteristic in a friend.
I offer many things to my friends; Honesty, Loyalty, and even Occasional
Reliability… And I would go to fairly extensive lengths to aid most people, but
one of the more absurd lines I draw is that I feel very put out when I have to perform
any tedious or inconvenient task without a chemical filter. It makes me the
world’s worst designated driver, but the flip side is that I’m the first person
you invite to accompany you to the Cannabis Cup when it’s being held on the most
important day of the Stoner Calendar in the newly-christened capitol of
American Marijuana Culture: The Mile High City on the 20th of April.
Like a healer in a D&D party, you have to bring me along. If only to roll
the joints.

It’s funny, to me, that I probably wouldn’t have been so
interested in trying pot in my early teens if I hadn’t already been hearing
about it for so long. As a child of the 90s, one of the first and most
important lessons the public school system thought I should be informed of
regarded the ready availability of a vast array of drugs evil people would soon
be cajoling me into becoming addicted to.

Aside from mental health care and programs for the poor, the
other major casualty of the Reagan years was the American education system.
Schools were repurposed suddenly and without warning, in the 80s, to serve less
as centers for education, and more as centers for indoctrination. Arguably,
there’s always been an element of that in public schooling, but in the years
leading up to and surrounding my birth, the trend became a national mandate.
The poster-child for the myriad of ways in which schools of that era were
turned into propaganda mouthpieces was the DARE program. Perhaps it was ironic
luck that they were terribly funded propaganda mouthpieces. Drug Abuse
Resistance Education is one of the many well-intentioned initiatives taken up
by our parents’ generation so they would not have to spend so much time raising
us themselves, and the only thing most of my peers got out of it was a much
earlier awareness of the existence of drugs. Even then, we could tell it was
clearly put together by people who knew absolutely nothing about either taking
drugs or talking to children.

As we grew and experienced life for ourselves, one of the
most repeated extracurricular lessons – even before elementary school was over –
was that what we learned out of the schoolbooks and the lectures was never more
than half true. So a brief few years later, when even the Beatles were telling
me what a great time they’d had on drugs, it was a short skip of conjecture to
the notion that perhaps those transparently heavy-handed warnings I’d received
for the previous half decade were more than a little bit full of shit. By the
end of high school most of my favorite bonding memories with my friends
involved sneaking off campus to smoke joints in playgrounds, climbing into the
tube slide for a windbreak. To this day, whenever I drive down the residential
backroads of Santa Fe, I get the sentimental urge to pack a crude metal pipe full
of Mexican brick weed and chase it with a cigarette.

By college I not only knew more people who smoked than
didn’t, there were only a select few who didn’t partake in “chuff,” as it came
to be referred to by my circle of friends. See, that was the rub of the whole
thing. Especially in the period right after we all moved out of our parents’
houses and inevitably (across the board, almost without exception) began
experimenting with mood and mind alteration, smoking pot was less about getting
fucked up and more about community (there are a lot of wonderful drugs for if
you want to be an antisocial asshole, but pot is just not one of them). For
instance, in the country of my birth (and generally, across Eastern Europe), it
is customary to welcome someone who enters your home with a cup of coffee – or
at least the offer. I didn’t find this out until I returned to my Motherland in
my mid-twenties, but when it happened, I was shocked at the similarity in tone
between these old babushkas offering me miniature cups of Turkish coffee and my
friends back home greeting me at the door with a bong.

Full disclosure, I went to an art school, so the student
body makeup leaned toward the liberal, experientially open-minded end of the
spectrum. That said, I have a lot of friends now that didn’t; friends that went
to state and private schools across the country – UMass, University of
Colorado, and Seattle University – and by all accounts they participated in
more debaucherous brain-cell holocausts than my socially awkward classmates and
I could have ever thought up. And while it’s true that college has a tendency
to bring out that sort of behavior in otherwise responsible youths, I’d argue
that, even among those who didn’t partake, far fewer were intolerant of being
around those who did than had been in previous generations. By the time we went
to war in Afghanistan, it was an accepted understanding by most people my age
that what we had been taught about drugs as children was comprised more of lies
intended to scare us than actual facts about drug use.

In this and other ways, my peers were pushed in great
numbers toward premature cynicism. The drug lie was just the most obvious; the
poster child of the betrayal. We lost faith in the optimistic future we were
promised, just like the generations before us, but not because the world was
once again ravaged by war – we lost our faith because we realized there had
never been a world without such horrors. To hope for anything better seemed
like a foolish waste of time. At this point it’s starting to look like one of
the things that will define us – just as the hippy movement defined the Boomers
and the Depression defined their parents – is our listless extended
adolescence. The sad irony, is that while we’re perceived as eternal children,
we lost our innocence far sooner than any children who had come before us; the
only reason we’re thought of that way is because so many of us refuse (largely
due to lack of opportunity) to “grow up” and become productive, contributing
members of society.

Zenon hands me another joint from the front seat. I could
swear I just handed him the blunt we had been passing around the car for the
previous 10 miles, and, looking up I realize that indeed we are now smoking two
marijuana cigarettes concurrently, in opposing rotation. Always good to stay
frosty; keep the senses sharp, honed, and alert. You never know when you’ll be
asked to rub your stomach and pat your head. Wouldn’t want to look stupid.

David Bowie Radio on Pandora. If you ever want a group of
picky middle class white people (hipsters, if you will) to stop complaining
about the music and changing it every 20 minutes, that’s what you go with. That
or Talking Heads. They’re interchangeable. You end up with a lot of your
parents’ music that rubbed off on you (making it great for mixed company),
without risking being subjected to Kansas or, god forbid, The Eagles, as with
most Classic Rock stations.

I hand over the newly rolled joint, accepting the dying
blunt, and quelling a moment’s paranoia by reminding myself that I’m not
driving, and this isn’t my car, so it’s perfectly reasonable (if not entirely
legal) for me to be high. That seems to work. The music seems to cut out for a
moment, and then, over the hiss of the wind through my sliding window, I hear
the muffled intro to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.

Pink Floyd was one of the first bands I seriously “got
into,” and it was (understandably) right after I first started smoking pot. I
don’t know if it was the music that made me want to expand my perspective or my
expanded perspective that made the music better, but the two were integrally
connected. Wish You Were Here, in particular, was an album I listened to quite
often when I was high as a kid, and I remember always feeling a strange sort of
time dilation, much like Kurt Vonnegut describes in Slaughterhouse Five. I
wouldn’t say I got totally unstuck in time, but I distinctly remember feeling
as though I was observing myself, retrospectively and nostalgically, from some
point in the future. Whether through coincidence or metaphysics, I now get a
similar but opposite feeling listening to that album – particularly the title
track. It’s familiar, like an old pair of shoes; a loneliness that feels like
it began before I was born and stretches beyond the path of time on either side,
containing all my possible lifetimes within it.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I’ve discussed this
feeling of loneliness with a heartbreaking number of my peers who have felt it
themselves. Perhaps it’s a feeling people have always felt, but so far as I can
tell, millennials are much more disposed to talking about it with each other
than our ancestors were. Perhaps it’s because we’re so self-centered, and
everything in our lives has been about maximizing and improving our individual
experiences. Or perhaps it’s because we seem, by and large, to tend to engage
in that establishment of self (perhaps by necessity) very individualistically.
We don’t truly share life-changing experiences with each other, largely because
we’re usually busy “sharing” our perspectives on those experiences with the
proverbial “everyone.”

We’re more connected on a day-to-day and minute-to-minute
basis than any humans before us could have ever reasonably hoped to be. The
most obvious change that has occurred, in the few short years since that became
the norm, has been a sudden and massive social disconnect. We’ve become so
preoccupied with our virtual presence that our physical presence has become
secondary. I’ve watched myself do it; fade in mid-conversation when a text
message blinks into my phone. I can’t help it. I know it’s rude, and I actively
fight the urge, but during that moment of struggle – even if I then win and
snap back to attention – I become at least partially removed from what is going
on around me. We have a constant inner checklist going on of all of our various
social and professional obligations, almost none of which take place in the
real world anymore, without a proxy.

The music is another obvious example of our brave new world.
Ten years ago, one major experiential facet of this trip would have been
determining and curating the music selection; giant binders of CDs to flip
through and feed into the machine every so often. Now we have a robot to do
that for us. We tell it we’d like to hear “Life on Mars,” and for the next
several hours, that’s one less aspect of our existence we have to worry about.
One less thing to pay attention to. One less thing to remember. It will be
interesting to find out how we look back on good times when even our best
friends are robots, or how we will look back on that thereafter. It suddenly
occurs to me that maybe we simply won’t. That’ll be interesting and new.

And we’re back to David Byrne again. And both the joint and
the blunt seem to be done for. Good riddance. I’m trying to do serious work
here. The Talking Heads. “Same as it ever was. There is water at the bottom of
the ocean.” Kind of sums it all up. Our current revolution is only a
reimagining of all the ones that came before it. Like our fathers and their
fathers before them, we’re flailing against the limitations we imposed on
ourselves, learning to live in this world as adults. A lot of those limitations
were erected by looking at our world, until very recently, through our parents’
eyes. Which isn’t to say that their perspective wasn’t valid in the time when
they were developing it, but it would be silly to think we can live in this
world while perceiving it with the mindset of someone from another world. That’s
what becoming an adult really is: the act of discarding your parents’ paradigm
when it is no longer of use. The world is a startlingly different place than it
was when this music was being made, and everything but the core sentiments that
make the true hits relevant has changed.

“The Times, they are a-changin’…” Dylan broke through to an
eternal Platonic Truth when he wrote that one down. And one day, eventually, it
will be the death knell to the cultural relevance of millennials, just as it
was for those who came before.